Soft Shoes flashes through a patch of moonlight, then darts into a
blind labyrinth of alleys and becomes only an intermittent scuffle
ahead somewhere in the enfolding darkness. In go Flowing Boots, with
short swords lurching and long plumes awry, finding a breath to curse
God and the black lanes of London.

Soft Shoes leaps a shadowy gate and crackles through a hedgerow.
Flowing Boots leap the gate and crackles through the hedgerow--and
there, startlingly, is the watch ahead--two murderous pikemen of
ferocious cast of mouth acquired in Holland and the Spanish marches.

But there is no cry for help. The pursued does not fall panting at the
feet of the watch, clutching a purse; neither do the pursuers raise a
hue and cry. Soft Shoes goes by in a rush of swift air. The watch
curse and hesitate, glance after the fugitive, and then spread their
pikes grimly across the road and wait for Flowing Boots. Darkness,
like a great hand, cuts off the even flow the moon.

The hand moves off the moon whose pale caress finds again the eaves
and lintels, and the watch, wounded and tumbled in the dust. Up the
street one of Flowing Boots leaves a black trail of spots until he
binds himself, clumsily as he runs, with fine lace caught from his
throat.

It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan
seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over
fence. Moreover, the adversary was obviously travelling near home or
at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims,
for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent
over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for
murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death.

Down long and sinuous lanes twisted the hunted and the harriers,
always in and out of the moon in a perpetual queen's move over a
checker-board of glints and patches. Ahead, the quarry, minus his
leather jerkin now and half blinded by drips of sweat, had taken to
scanning his ground desperately on both sides. As a result he suddenly
slowed short, and retracing his steps a bit scooted up an alley so
dark that it seemed that here sun and moon had been in eclipse since
the last glacier slipped roaring over the earth. Two hundred yards
down he stopped and crammed himself into a niche in the wall where he
huddled and panted silently, a grotesque god without bulk or outline
in the gloom.

The voice faded into a low crunch of a boot, nor did Soft Shoes wait
to hear more--he sprang in three leaps across the alley, where he
bounded up, flapped for a moment on the top of the wall like a huge
bird, and disappeared, gulped down by the hungry night at a mouthful.